Nowadays, as the world becomes more global, the different ways that people can communicate with other people around the world have rapidly been increasing in number and popularity. People may now utilize an eclectic assortment of devices and systems such as, for example, cellular phones, e-mail, SMS text messaging, iChat™, and instant messaging through a client such as AOL Instant Messenger™ to communicate with each other. However, it sometimes seems that the communication and messaging services can be utilized to such an extent that the user is unable to efficiently keep track of what messages that were received.
For example, oftentimes a person may have one or more unread e-mail or voice-mail messages in their possession. However, the user may be unaware of these unread messages or unwilling to sort through the messages (due, for example, to the number of unread messages) and might e-mail someone with a question, who might have already answered that question in one of the unviewed communications. The user may do this despite the fact that the answer to the user's question (or relevant information) may already be present in the user's unread messages. Thus, the user could be wasting valuable time and resources by communicating with the other person when this communication might be wholly unnecessary and redundant.
This scenario can occur not only when the user has unread e-mail messages, but may also occur when the user has, for example, unheard voicemail messages or unread SMS text messages, or any other form of communications. Additionally, this scenario may also occur when the user attempts to, for example, call on a cellular phone, call through a computer-based system such as iChat™, SMS text message, or instant message, a second party. As used in this text, “second party” or “second parties” refers to a person with whom the user desires to communicate and/or send a message.
As another example, a user may have messages which are opened and/or unopened, but is unable or unwilling to manually keep track of their content. This may occur because the user may simply have received so many messages during a given period of time, it may be too difficult to go through them all quickly (e.g., users are often inaccessible during a cross-country flight in the middle of the business day, and there may be 100 or more messages waiting for the user once wireless communications are permitted). Thus, the user may desire to communicate with a second party regarding a certain topic and even though the user may already in possession of messages which are relevant to the topic. However, the user may, for example, not remember the content of the messages, not remember where the messages are located, be unwilling to retrieve the messages, etc. In this case, the user may be wasting time and resources by communicating with a second party regarding a topic when the user may already be in possession of the information relevant to this topic. The present invention relates to systems and methods for providing a user with unread and/or relevant messages prior to communicating with a second party.